Huawei Octa-Core Glory 4/Honor 4 to be Launched in December

In addition to planning the release of the true 8-core Ascend P6S smartphone this year, Chinese mobile phone maker Huawei is also looking into the launch of other octa-core devices as well, with the Glory 4 / Honor 4 included. The company’s CEO Richard Yu has already confirmed this on Sina Weibo, suggesting that the two devices will prove great competitors against Xiaomi’s smartphones when landing in December. However, as UnwiredView notes, Huawei has been using the Glory 4 and Honor 4 names for the same device in different markets, so we won’t see two different handsets launched next month. Apparently, Huawei will pack the new device with MediaTek’s MT6592 “true” octa-core processor, which should make it a high-end smartphone,...

Read more »

New API to Bring Camera RAW to Android Devices

Soon, Android might be able to enjoy brand new camera capabilities on their devices, including support for Camera RAW, the latest reports on the matter suggest. Apparently, Google has been working on enhancing the camera capabilities of the OS for quite some time now, and was even ready to bring said improvements to Android 4.4 KitKat, but opted out of this at the last minute. However, the company has been working on new camera API for the platform since December 2012, and might arrive in the not-too-distant future. As Arstechnica found in the commit for the feature, a new API class called “Android.hardware.photography” was planned for Android, capable of delivering brand new functionality to users. “Full-capability devices allow...

Read more »

Google Engineer Explains Some Graphical Tweaks in Android 4.4 KitKat

Android 4.4 KitKat, the latest version of Google’s mobile operating system, comes with a series of small tweaks to the interface, including whitened icons in the status bar, and a Google engineer now explains why this has happened. Apparently, the idea of turning all icons white was an aesthetic one, making the System UI a more neutral one and allowing apps to better manage their own color palettes, Dan Sandler explains on Google+. Another change made in the new OS flavor was the removal of network connectivity indicators from the status bar, and their appearance in the Quick Settings menu. The network indicator is still present on the homescreen next to the clock, but it appears only in white, without letting users know whether they...

Read more »

Need for Speed Movie Gets Full Length Trailer

The Need for Speed movie starring Aaron Paul has just received a full length trailer that shows a lot more footage from the upcoming film, after the rather short teaser one that came out several weeks ago. The Need for Speed game franchise has been around for many years and has spanned console generations but, rather surprisingly, no movie adaptations were ever devised. Things changed last year when EA partnered with Dreamworks to create a film based on the series, which rapidly went into production after signing big stars like Aaron Paul, of Breaking Bad fame. Now, after a short teaser video some weeks ago, a full length version of the Need for Speed movie trailer has been released to coincide with the launch of the next game in the series - NFS: Rivals. As you can see above,...

Read more »

NVIDIA Tesla K40 is World's Fastest Graphics Accelerator

NVIDIA made a big splash on the supercomputing front when it launched the Tesla K20 last year, much more so than any previous GPU compute accelerator, and now it hopes to repeat the feat. The company has introduced the Tesla K40, a Kepler card featuring 2,880 CUDA cores and 12 GB of RAM. It should be able to crunch numbers 40% faster than Tesla K20, despite its only having 192 more processing cores. Don't be shocked by the distinct lack of video ports. This card is specifically made for parallel computing. It won't be displaying images anytime soon. Servers using the card already exist, and the University of Texas at Austin intends to use it in the Maverick remote visualization supercomputer (which will be put online in January...

Read more »